Split a quoted string with a delimiter

Question

I want to split a string with a delimiter white space. but it should handle quoted strings intelligently. E.g. for a string like

\"John Smith\" Ted Barry 
<         


        

Answer 1

commons-lang has a StrTokenizer class to do this for you, and there is also java-csv library.

Example with StrTokenizer:

String params = "\"John Smith\" Ted Barry"
// Initialize tokenizer with input string, delimiter character, quote character
StrTokenizer tokenizer = new StrTokenizer(params, ' ', '"');
for (String token : tokenizer.getTokenArray()) {
   System.out.println(token);
}

Output:

John Smith
Ted
Barry